Open AccessA long trail of serendipity‐directed research on photosynthetic bacteria
Author(s) -
Gest Howard
Publication year - 1992
Publication title -
fems microbiology letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.899
H-Index - 151
eISSN - 1574-6968
pISSN - 0378-1097
DOI - 10.1111/j.1574-6968.1992.tb14071.x
Subject(s) - serendipity , epistemology , philosophy
“When you are young, you want all new knowledge to fit into the theories of the time (‘the dogma of the day’). Happily, this is not the way it always happens in the real world”. [Roberts, R.M. (1989) Serendipity/Accidental Discoveries in Science, John Wiley, NY, p. viii]. Why? Because serendipity is alive and well. This paper is a personal account of how serendipity directed a trail of research on photosynthetic bacteria from 1947 to 1992.